Ned had already left the meadow by the time that Meriel and Robbie reached it with the missing sunhat. He went directly to the stables to find a head collar for Archie and canter him down to the Gap, with poor Puck panting to keep up. He’d done it a hundred times before in summer holidays and university vacations; riding bareback like this with a towel across the horse’s neck. But those days had gone now – long gone.
Etheridge was out on the mown slope by his cottage, and nodded gravely at the rider. ‘Sounds like they’ve started, Mr Ashby Sir,’ he said. ‘Defence chaps down there say it’s the Somme this time; Albere or summat.’ He indicated a group of soldiers standing by the old bathing machine down on the beach. ‘Never thought we’d ’ear them, not from Sel’ton. Mus’ be a middlin’ bannickin’ our boys are givin’ they ol’ Germins?’
‘Yes, I’d say so.’ Ned managed a crooked smile before turning Archie through the gate, down past the soldiers and their wire defences to the lower beach.
‘Evenin’ Sir. It’s started then.’ The Royal Defence Corps, who’d recently taken over patrol of the Gap from Father and his amateurs, were decent enough fellows, and Ned knew the sergeant would have welcomed a discussion on the new Allied offensive. But he didn’t want to hear his views, or anyone’s. Not now.
‘Started, Sergeant, but not finished,’ he said briefly, and left them staring after him as he took Archie to the water’s edge. It was low tide. There were sandhoppers in their thousands at the tideline, and dotterels feasting on them; pretty little grey and russet birds, running to and fro across the sand regardless of the horse or dog or the continuous vibrations. Archie dipped his head to a skein of oarweed which had washed in from deep water, pulling out a long brown ribbon of the stuff and munching it with obvious satisfaction. Puck explored the shallows, staring frequently at the horizon but no longer barking. Ned simply sat and listened. The heavy thudding of the guns muffled, as if it had to penetrate a barrier of some kind. But Ned knew that there was nothing now but distance between him and the fighting.
For days now he’d been waiting for news of the new offensive. Everyone had, except Meriel. Helen heard through the Supply Depôt in Lewes where she worked, that the wards of the 2nd Eastern General in Brighton had been cleared of all convalescents, to be ready for a great influx of wounded. Ever since Kitchener’s drowning, Father had spent hours in the library staring at his map, while the universal silence of the press on the subject of the coming ‘push’ had only added to the general tension. Now it had come, not only to the Somme, but to Sellington and all the downland villages and valleys to whom the sound of battle was now audible. And no one who heard it, as Ned heard it on the beach that evening, could ignore its implication. There were men dying out there at this very moment – men being torn apart, dismembered, shattered; their bones thrust through their flesh by British shells assembled in sunny Sussex holiday resorts like Eastbourne, or by young country girls shift-working at the great munitions factory at Willesden. After the preliminary bombardment would come the push itself; the ‘Big Push’, with thousands, tens of thousands more lives tossed down like gambling chips in a game of war that had long since outgrown its players.
How many thousands this time for a few miles of devastated land? Fifteen thousand like Mons and Le Cateau? Fifty thousand like Gallipoli? Sixty thousand like the first battle of Ypres, where the exhausted remnant of Kitchener’s first expeditionary force had given up their lives for Calais? It was slaughter on a brand new scale, by armies who calculated victories and defeats mathematically. In terms of casualties the battle of Neuve Chapelle alone had been worse than Waterloo. Allied losses in five weeks of the Dardanelles campaign exceeded those of the entire South African War. God only knew how many French and Germans had already died at Verdun? Three hundred thousand? Half a million? More? And on it went. Both sides had rejected outright the American President’s offers to mediate for peace. And now there was the Somme and another fresh New Army – thousands more expendable young conscripts to be waved off to the Front – thousands more new shells to be shipped out from Newhaven – thousands of waiting beds – thousands of wooden crosses – thousands of hearthrug strategists like Father, ready to plot an insignificant new salient in the Western Front that in all likelihood would prove impossible to hold.
It was sickening for Ned to have to face the fact that man’s natural violence could have such an immense destructive force, although he’d always known it to exist. But Meriel refused to face it, any of it, right from the beginning. The numbers were greatly exaggerated, she said, had to be. She’d long ago decided they were fools – the soldiers, generals, politicians, Germans, she made no distinction. Fools the lot of them! And her willingness to look away from what she didn’t wish to see appeared to be increasing; a thing that increasingly concerned her husband. She wouldn’t speak, or even think about the death of her elder brother Harry with the Anzacs out at Suvla Bay. After the failure of her father’s mercury enterprise, she could still describe him as ‘iron mining in Pennsylvania’ – as if she’d never heard of his profiteering activities as a purchasing agent, supplying U.S. minerals for use in ammunition. The war, war consciences, the whole damn mess was indigestible to Meriel. So she spat it out.
So Ned faced what his wife could not. He could no longer believe in the old shibboleths of Justice and Freedom in the context of this war, or share the General Staff’s scorn for a negotiated peace. He had begun to suspect that it was British Imperial pride as much as German militarism that was keeping the thing going now, in a reckless ‘fight to the finish’ that would finish far more than one fanatical Hohenzollern. But he also saw, as Meriel wouldn’t, that the life they knew had already changed irretrievably. Dan had gone to fight. So had Hurst and Tinsley and Jemmy Vine. They were all out there somewhere behind the guns – and Armiger in Belgium; in his grave now for some fourteen months.
And Bill has left his woolly flock,
And Tom has left the farm;
And Jack deserts the farmyard stock,
And Jake throws off the Sussex smock,
He too now leaves his master’s flock
And answers the alarm.
Arthur Beckett’s verse in the Sussex County Herald spoke of the county’s human tribute of men to the holocaust. But there was more to it than that.
‘The ol’ ways are goin’, Mus Ned, whether we like it or no.’
That’s what Dan told him after the last Sheep Fair, while they sat by the cricket pitch waiting to go in to bat. And Dan was right. For in the months since then the war had penetrated every aspect of their lives life; as poisonous and corrosive as the yellow gas that killed poor Armiger at Hill 60. You could hardly take a step beyond the farm these days without passing one of the encampments of dismal huts and canvas stablings that marred the contours of the downs. Or a Sea Scout airship droning slowly overhead. Or a brake full of noisy convalescents flourishing their dressings. They were everywhere, the convalescents, occupying Nissen wards, drill halls and seaside boarding houses. In Brighton, Prinny’s Royal Pavilion had become a hospital for Indian soldiers. There were even patients in the great house in Grosvenor Crescent where Meriel had once captured a mouse, and rather more. It had become an annexe of the King Edward VII Hospital, Simmie wrote to say, with rows of iron beds scarring the surface of the dance floor; itself a casualty of the war.
Ned couldn’t pretend like Meriel. Not any more. He couldn’t ignore what was happening in France, or here at home in Sussex. He couldn’t go on devoting his energies to producing food that was denied to so many who needed it, or turn a blind eye to those who lined their pockets from its sale.
‘I wouldn’ go for choice,’ Dan had confided to him while they watched the cricket. ‘But there ain’t no sense in bellickin’ about it, neither. For if blokes like me didn’ go a-soldierin’ there’d be no men to fight – an’ if blokes like you didn’ stay, Mus Ned, why there’d be nothin’ left to fight for.’
But since then too many more had died, and too many more had stayed to profit from their deaths. The evidence of another phase in their destruction was still pounding in Ned’s ears as he rode back up the valley to the rickyard, thudding through the comfortable summer evening sounds of rooks and ring-doves and gently clenking sheep bells. The continuing destruction of human flesh with high explosives was the only sound he heard.
There was no point in telling Meriel of his decision; not until he was quite sure that he could pull it off – and Gran was bound to be obstructive. So after they had finished dinner, he took it to his father in the library.
‘Mind if I put on a pipe, Father?’ He held the door open for Puck, and closed it behind him while he fumbled for his tobacco tin and trusty briar. ‘I’ve been dying to light up all evening.’
‘Dear boy.’ Walter waved a dismissive hand. Yet there was something unusually alert in his blue eyes.
Ned lit a spill and took a few quick sucks to make sure that the pipe was drawing. In here with Father and with Puck, with the smell of books, a good meal in his belly, the Western Front seemed no more real than its line in pencil on the map.
‘It’s no use, Father, I can’t dodge the column any longer.’ A sentence, once spoken, that must change everything. ‘I’ve known all along I’d have to go some day if the war lasted; and I’d never have stuck it out ’til now if it hadn’t been for Meri.’
‘Then I expect you’ll be wanting a note from me to send with your letter to the Tribunal, Ned? Some kind of assurance that I’m fit and willing to run the farm while you’re away; although God knows your wife will do the lion’s share?’
He hadn’t expected it. His father had always been such a neutral figure in his life, so overshadowed by his grandmother, that Ned expected him to recoil from the emergency and take refuge in evasion. Now he saw that he’d misjudged him.
‘I don’t suppose it’ll be that simple, Father. I should think old Wilmott will want to come to see you personally in his capacity as Inspector, to be sure you can manage. And I’m afraid we’ll have to keep the whole thing under our hats until it’s settled. There’ll be the devil of a shindy as it is when Gran and Meri find out. Do you think that you can bear it?’
‘My dear fellow, do you imagine that I’ve survived all these years with your grandmother without being able to weather a squall or two of that kind?’ Walter hesitated awkwardly on his way over to his writing desk, to pat his son on the shoulder.
‘Sending me off to school,’ Ned thought unfairly, ‘with a bright new sovereign in my pocket.’
‘You’re not to suppose that I want to lose you any more than they do,’ his father muttered, echoing the words of the recruiting song. ‘You’re a trump, Ned, always were. The best thing I ever did was fathering you. Or ever will do, I daresay.’ He said it without meeting his son’s eyes; standing with his back to him, busy with the papers on his desk. ‘I expect you think I’m a pretty poor fish, my boy. But I have my good faults, as they say, as well as my bad ones – and I do understand, because I’d have gone myself you see if I wasn’t such a crock.’
If his father had been unexpectedly supportive, the Local Tribunal and Royal Sussex Regiment were both almost indecent in their haste to smooth Ned’s path for him to a commission, and to France. Unprecedented casualties on the Somme, it seemed, had streamlined procedures wonderfully for shipping new men to the Front.
Meriel’s reaction, when she heard the news from Ned had come as no surprise.
‘Of course I always knew you were soft in the head,’ she told him. ‘But I was fool enough to think that you had more consideration for me and for the boys than to go and get it blown to smithereens for the benefit of the bloody War Office!’
After the first hasty sentence she’d begun to puff and blow like a little opera singer working up to a high C – hands clasped before her, bosom heaving. ‘You promised Ned! You promised me you wouldn’t go…!’
‘Now Meri, you know that isn’t true.’
‘You did, you promised; and if you didn’t you certainly led me to believe you had. And of all the vile, sneaky, underhand… ’
‘Darling, steady on; you know that you’ll regret this later.’
‘Regret it? Are you trying to be funny? I’d regret it if I didn’t tell you exactly what I think of you, Ned Ashby, here and now! I suppose you think it’s honourable and brave to leave us when we need you most; to go swaggering off to play at silly war games all got up like Vesta Tilley! Is that your idea of fun? WELL, IS IT?’
‘Meri, darling, I know you’re frightened and upset. But why must you say things that we both know you don’t mean?’
‘Why? WHY? Because you will not learn to do as you’re told, Ned Ashby. That’s why!’
And when Ned had to smile at her then for her appalling presumption, and forgive her for it, and try to fold her in his arms – Meriel had torn herself away from him to stamp out of the room and slam the door behind her.
After that, and right up to the moment that he left for Shoreham Camp, she’d treated him with an aloof indifference which hurt him far more deeply than anything she could have said in anger.
For Ned the camp felt very like his first term at boarding school, although the lessons were rather different. He learned how to salute correctly, how to dismantle a Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle and how not to lace his boots crosswise. He became proficient in Field Service Regulations. He could use a Mills Bomb in theory, and a light machine gun – and disembowel a straw-filled German with a bayonet. He felt a little homesick in the noisy bonhomie of the officers’ mess, and lovesick for Meri on his folding camp bed. And on the parade ground in his Temporary Second Lieutenant’s uniform, he felt a thorough-going fraud, drilling squads of convalescent trench-veterans who understood the reality of war too well. There’d been a hag-ridden expression deep in the eyes of those men, which gave the lie to the recruiting officer’s description of the wounded as eager to return to the Front. But they wouldn’t speak of it. They knew as Ned did that the average life expectancy of a junior officer at the Front was no more than eight weeks – and like the Bury farm workers of his youth, they tolerated his ignorance of the business without obvious rancour.
He arrived home on leave one cold Friday in early December, with orders to report back to camp first thing on Monday morning, and entrain from there Folkestone via Victoria – which in practical terms meant leaving home soon after tea on Sunday.
On the Sunday morning they all wrapped up for church; where Ned was forced to endure Mrs Pilbeam’s face staring woodenly at him, as he read the lesson from the pulpit in his crisp new uniform. Her son Tony had died on the very first day of the push that followed the Somme bombardment. So had Bat’s grandson, Jemmy Vine. And so, in a single day, had fifty thousand other young Britons in the tragic misapprehension that their guns had smashed the German defences. After church, they walked the farm as they did every Sunday – Ned and Shad Caldwell, with Walter and Meriel in tow and the unsuspecting Puck running round in circles, so glad to have his master home again. They inspected the cledgy furrows of the ploughlands and the seedcorn in the barn, agreed the crop rotation for next year, and pondered the possibility of taking on some Land Army girls from haymaking through to harvest. Then Ned walked up alone to say so-long to Bat and the Southdown flock; his spirit shrinking in him with every step he took.
By luncheon it had compressed itself into a tight, hard fist high under his ribs; and it had only been the presence of the boys at table that enabled him to maintain the performance they all seemed to expect. There were no awkward silences. Father and Helly, normally so quiet, fell over one another to fill the gaps with any topic they could think of, even attempting French to involve the Waedemons. Meriel scolded the children for their table manners. And dear old Gran, sitting at the head of the table in her long black cardigan, had gone on cutting them down to size out of sheer habit, while she watched her grandson with a look of ferocious tenderness that he found hard to bear.
Apart from the one impulsive detour into the orchard on honeymoon in Kent, Ned had only ever made love to Meriel in daylight early in the morning, and never in the afternoon. And whatever they expected downstairs, he felt embarrassed to suggest it; until Meriel robbed him of the choice by drawing their bedroom curtains with a violence that surprised them both. Someone had had the foresight to order them a fire, despite the shortages of coal. But the sheets were cold, and so was Meriel when he reached out to touch her; to prove, he thought, that this time would be no better than the last – as if the war that claimed him had already killed unsoldierly emotions. But there was something that it couldn’t kill, and he wanted her to know it.
‘If I should die out there, Meri…’
‘For God’s sake don’t say that – and get used to the idea of living, Ned. Because that’s what you’re going to do, take it from me!’
‘But darling we have to talk about it. However much I’d like to be, I’m not immortal.’
‘And I’m not listening, Noggin, because I just can’t bear to!’ She clamped her hands over her ears and closed her eyes as well.
‘Meri, you have to,’ he insisted, tugging at her hands and holding them back hard against the bolster. The elevated position of her arms lifted her small breasts clear of the counterpane; creamy, rose-tipped as a girl’s. ‘Darling, you’ve got to face the possibility, at least.’
‘Why? Why must I? Because it isn’t a possibility, and I won’t think of it as one. I won’t, do you hear me? I JUST WON’T!’
She wrenched free to wriggle out and over him, using her body as she’d done before to vanquish his resistance. Then as he stirred beneath her, she slid aside to massage and caress him, until he turned himself to grope for what he needed.
For Ned the moment of admission was the sum of all the moments they had shared. He had so badly wanted Meriel to understand that nothing in the future, not even his death in this senseless war, could rob her of what they’d had – of what they loved about each other. But now his body found a way of telling her, and then another and another, until he was quite sure she understood.
If only love’s certainties could survive its climaxes. As it was, all the miseries of parting had returned with the first sight of his uniform laid out ready for him in the dressing room. Cook had squandered most of her rationed flour on scones for tea and one of her famous Sussex ‘plum biscuit’ teacakes. But Ned couldn’t eat – and when he slipped back to the kitchen to say goodbye, and to be hugged to Cook’s broad print-covered bosom, he felt the last dim flicker of his childhood snuff out inside him.
They all stood on the front step in the twilight to watch him down the drive to the first bend, with Helly holding Puck back by the collar. As Meriel turned Archie up the valley road towards the village, the side-lamps of the cart shone briefly on the knapped flints of the stable wall. All the listless colours of the winter landscape had deepened now to indigo; and although the night was fine, the moon showed only as a thin rind on the black shadow of the earth.
‘Look Daddy, it’s following us!’ Robbie whispered, peering up out of the woolly cocoon that Betty had wrapped him in. ‘The moon’s coming to say goodbye as well!’
Gran had strongly disapproved of taking the children out in the cold and the dark. So had Betty, although she knew better than to say so in the face of Meriel’s determination.
‘Of course they’ll come to see their father off,’ she told them, and there was a brittle quality to her voice that made it clear to all that she was not to be dissuaded.
The boys were thrilled – particularly Robbie, who went on whispering excitedly all the through the spooky shadows of the village, while he snuggled close into his father’s side. ‘Will there be Christmas in France, Daddy, and presents for the soldiers? And mummers an’ carol singers and a turkey? I’ve seen the one we’re going to have. He is as big as this! An’ Cook’s going to make a great big cake with icing and a bit of holly on the top. And we’re going up to London next week on the train with Betty. Simmie’s going to take us to the Toy Fair at Gammages, isn’t she, Mummy?’
‘Well, she might if it doesn’t snow too much to get down to the station. They’ve got it up north already I hear – and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we woke up one morning soon to find everything turned white outside the windows!’
‘Daddy won’t though, will he? They don’t have windows do they in trenches.’
Poor Meri, trying so desperately to sound cheerful. Ned leant across to squeeze the driving apron that covered her small knees. He’d handed her the reins to give her something else to think about. But Archie knew the road of course, even in the dark. It certainly was cold enough for snow. The potholes and puddles of the village street were already paned with ice. But the sky was clear still when they reached the open downland by the Gibbet Cross.
‘Pat look, we’re right up in the stars! Let’s pretend we’re flying – shall we? Let’s be airships dropping bombs onto the U boats!’ Robbie was gleefully impervious to his parents’ misery and to the anxious, haunted look that had crept into his brother’s pinched little face. He was right about the sky though. One was more aware of it than anything up there at night. The wind soughed through the bents and stunted upland gorse, bearing with it the rasping bark of a dog fox from somewhere in the combe below. The yellow beams of the cart’s side-lamps lit the verges of the track and flickered on the shaggy flanks of the old horse. But as they jogged on down towards the Cuckmere River, it was the starry hemisphere above them that dominated.
Lighting restrictions were still in force in Seaford, despite the recent reduction in Zeppelin activity; and Ned jumped out as they approached South Camp to turn their lamps down.
‘Like smugglers!’ said Robbie as they joined the shadowy throng along the whitewashed station kerb. ‘‘Baccy for the clerk’ Pat, ’member?’
There was the choice of an illuminated and very public ticket office that stank of cigarette smoke, or the freezing anonymity of the station platform. They chose the platform, standing close together with their backs to the metals to shield the boys from the cold wind. Someone down at the far end was whistling ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’; and at the sound of it Meriel began talking rapidly, just as Father and Helly had done at luncheon, racing from one trivial subject to the next – from the leaking cowshed roof to War Loan dividends to a workhouse Christmas party at East Dean – with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her coat and her breath gusting on the frosty air. Ned tried to help her in her last attempt at self-deception. But his mouth was dry; and there was a gripe, a kind of cold cramp somewhere in his chest which made it difficult for him to speak.
A signal clattered somewhere. Then they heard the train putt-puttering towards them from the direction of Newhaven – and the constriction moved up into Ned’s throat to choke him.
They embraced, he and Meri, with the two boys clinging to their legs and nothing left to say.
The blinds were drawn down in all the carriages. But as the train doors opened to disgorge its passengers, he saw her face lit for an instant, before she pushed his children at him and stumbled blindly off into the darkness.